I found your first book today in a second hand store at the Harrisburg Station. Dingy and age-tanned, it retained its dustcover, with a photo of you at 22, wearing a threadbare corduroy coat I'm sure is still in your closet, and what might pass for a smile. It's a rare first print from '69. My war. Your deferment. You kept to your poetry like you kept to the old neighborhood, both mired in bottomless poverty— an endless scraping by. Yet, just last year, The Times called you the Bashful Bard of Brooklyn. We will lay you out tomorrow in a sandy plot in one of those many cemeteries that dot the flat, emptiness of the mid-island plains. Bury you next to Mary your common-law wife of fifty three years and your only treasure. Old friend, I never told you what I felt when I first held a copy of your book. I was outside my tent, less than a mile from the wreckage of Ben Tre. The package had been waiting for me while we took that city down. Not even the rats and the roaches could have survived our fury. "That should be me," I thought, and tossed that splendid book on the residue of the war.